An Island in December

A story with a mysterious woman, the president, and a moment where everything changes.

Red turtlenecks. Every one of them was wearing one. Under a wool jacket with a miniature American flag pin on the lapel. In December, so close to the holidays, it was meant to be camouflage, but at the sight of such a glaring faux pas – and an eerie repetition of the offense by other men stationed around the parking lot -- everyone knew that He was nearby. The town, which one night earlier had been completely still, heavy with the black emptiness that all port cities acquire when the air turns icy, had been revived -- had, in fact, poured itself into the lobby of the local hotel and surrounded him so that he had become an island with a sea of people lapping at him. As the row closest to him stepped forward, so did all the rest, and when they turned away, another row stepped back to let them pass, then forward again, so that the crowd undulated with the push and pull of its own tide. Buoyed to the front where the crowd was breaking off, I touched the rough tweed just above his elbow and called out --

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"Mr. President?" He slipped an arm around my shoulder and with a clenched-teeth ventriloquist smile drawled "Yesss, you beautiful thing?" as flashes exploded around us, constant like the stars over the rocky crags of the Atlantic. And then somewhere in the periphery there was a flash of red -- not at all like the lighthouse beacons which call a ship home, but rather the red flash of an alarm that sent people crashing in every direction.

Je Banach is currently working on her first novel. She has written for literary critic Harold Bloom in conjunction with his Bloom's Guides series for Facts on File, Inc., and writes regularly for Random House's Academic Resources division.